Tristessa

Tristessa Jack Kerouac 96pp.

Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa, while not functioning very well as a novella, provides a tremendous insight into Kerouac’s spritual life. The  book is a lengthy mediation on his relationship with Tristessa, a morphine junky in Mexico City. With no subtlety or obfuscation, Kerouac wants to portray himself as a hero coming into Tristessa’s broken, hellish existence in Mexico city and lifting her up into his idealized life as a religious wanderer.Through this angle, Tristessa paints a perfect picture of his understanding of Buddhism and how he imagines himself acting through that. 

On its surface, Tristessa is an exploration of Tristessa’s life and the society she lives in in Mexico City. But this is not Kerouac’s interest. Rather, he uses this as a lens through which he can portray his own interest in Buddhism, combined with his upbringing in a staunchly Roman Catholic family. What this lens shows to the reader is Kerouac’s twist on Buddhism, into a salvific religion, by which he could bring his friends out of their sordid lives and into a world of perfect joy.

This frankly demeaning view of the world works well with Tristessa, and we see Kerouac jaunting around Mexico city with her, idealizing this woman into a perfect archon of beauty and joy. The comparison goes so far as to imply that Tristessa herself is a type of the Virgin Mary, reborn in the filth of Mexico City. Kerouac honestly believes that through her experience and living with her, he could attain to enlightenment and lift her up at the same time.

We see this syncretism of Catholicism and Buddhism at its finest when Kerouac and Tristessa are in front of an altar to the Virgin, at which, after lighting a cigarette from an altar candle, Kerouac makes a prayer to the Virgin “‘Excuse mué ma ‘Dame’”-making special emphasis on Dame because of the Mother of Buddhas.” This combination of religious imagery pops up all throughout the text, as Kerouac constantly equivocates Tristessa and the Virgin/Damema, fusing the two in his mind into an idealized angelic figure perfectly pure amidst the squalor of morphine in Mexico City.

In the course of the novella, Kerouac goes so far as to decide that Tristessa “doesn’t need saving,” he eventually comes back to Mexico City a year later, and sees her living in the same state he left her. After a week or so of bumming around the city and realizing that he is playing second fiddle to the morphine in her life, he packs up and moves on with his life, leaving Tristessa as a perfect icon in his mind.

While the gender politics in Tristessa are very problematic: Kerouac has to be the big hero coming in to Mexico to either lift up and save or abase himself and worship at the feet of this idealized woman; the novella remains a wonderful crystallization of his jazz prose. The sentences roll together in a carefully metered casual rhythm, painting the city in rich pictures. On the whole, the novella provides an enjoyable evening’s read.

Would I recommend Tristessa? Yes.

Score: 3.8/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.